Empire

44 Out

Mark was still warm.

Jenna pulled herself to him and kissed his face. There was no feeling in her lips. She nestled her head in the crook of his neck and sighed.

The man in black was still fighting in the foyer. After a few minutes, the fighting ceased.

He threw the bolts in the front door and ascended the stairs. Jenna looked hopefully at him.

"I don't do that anymore." He said. But he knelt beside her, gathering his robes to cover her broken body.

"Will Lily be all right?" Jenna mumbled. "I'll keep watch over her." He answered. She nodded and turned to caress the dead man beside her.

"A beautiful ache?" He asked.

Jenna smiled. "I wrote a song that said that." Then she died.

He went into the bedroom.

Tetch's eyelids fluttered. Heavy with drying blood, they lifted, and his red gaze took the spectre in.

"Are you here to kill me?"

"In time." The dark man said.

An hour or so later, the ferals outside were drawn into the house by a long, tortured scream. When they reached Tetch, he was dead. They sat around him and used broken glass to cut his flesh.

Hundreds of them crowded inside, searching every room on every floor, packing the house. It groaned madly around them. Then it all came down, wood and flesh and stone, all came down into the cellar, into the Hell a man had made. They lay pinned in the wreckage and pawed at one another, a cacophony of groans filling the night sky.

(Where are we going?)

"I'm not entirely sure." Voorhees finally replied. "North, I can tell you that much. That's where all the other people have gone."

"What people?"

"There used to be a lot of people in Jefferson Harbor. They left when the Army did. There are cities, safe cities, in the north. And I don't know how to get all the way to those cities, but I think we can catch up with the Army."

"Why did they leave?"

Voorhees frowned over the steering wheel. "They decided it wouldn't do any good to keep fighting for this place."

Lily stared at her hands, folded in her lap, and said, "I guess they were right."

"We tried." Voorhees snapped. She cast a frightful look in his direction, and he tried to soften his tone. "The people who died back there at the house, they didn't die for nothing. They died saving your life."

"I'm sorry." She pleaded. Pursing his lips, he offered her his best facsimile of a smile. "You'll get it when you're older."

In the middle of the night, they reached a military fuel station. Voorhees whispered a silent prayer that there'd still be gas beneath the cement slab; he slipped the pump into the truck and waited.

The gentle sloshing brought a genuine smile to his face. Looking toward the cab, he saw Lily watching him through the rear windshield. She returned the expression.

The headlights caught the faintest hint of something moving on the horizon. Voorhees leaned into the cab and flipped on the high beams. It was a single rotter, a good thousand yards away, moving on a broken ankle.

He pulled the widowmaker from its sheath. "I'll be right back. Keep the doors locked."

"You could just let it go." Lily said. He fixed his eyes on her naive little face and shook his head. "Be right back."

He strode across the barren soil toward the undead. It lifted its bloody head to study him. He stopped, waiting to see what it would do.

It opened its mouth and moaned for his flesh. It came at him.

When it was finished, he replaced the fuel pump and got into the truck. Lily was silent.

"I didn't do it because of what he was." He told her. "I did it because of what he used to be."

Back in Jefferson Harbor, at the city plaza, Gene was standing. He felt the night wind picking up and let it caress his face. Something inside him tugged gently, pleasantly, and he didn't move a muscle for several minutes. Just stood there, feeling.

He knew one thing: he had tasted the flesh of the man in black, and he was no longer what he had been. His stomach still yearned for meat, and he kneaded his palms as the nagging, maddening need made his mouth water. But there was something else, too. A new purpose.

Gene picked up his shovel and started walking.